An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Four Years Ago in Knoxville—A Shattered Sunday Morning

Sunday morning impatiens.

Periodic
shooting outbreaks and mass killings have become a feature of modern American life. It is already a cliché that they shock us,
but no longer surprise us. Unless we are
tethered to the event by ties to the victims, geography, or some other
accident, our grief and outrage fade after a day or two and we resume our lives
puttering away at the mundane until the next horror grabs our fleeting
attention.

The
carnage last week in Aurora has
perhaps lingered longer than others if only because it is coupled in our
imaginations with a cultural icon—the latest Batman movie—and the queasy feeling, if we pass our time occasionally
in similar cinema multiplexes, that
it could have been us.

But
the Olympics are on, and after that
the political conventions. The kids will be going back to school
and, hey, the summer is slipping away.
We are already, as they say on television “moving on.”

Of
course if we do have that personal connection, perhaps we have not given it up
quite so casually just yet. And in this
world since we are, it is alleged, only separated by six degrees from any other mortal, many of us stumble into some
unexpected connection. It turns out that
one of several young men who died in that Colorado
movie house protecting his girlfriend with his body, Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class John Larimer, was from here in Crystal Lake, Illinois. At 27 he was just a year younger than my
youngest daughter and although they went to different high schools they must
inevitably had some mutual acquaintances.

And
after a memorial at church yesterday for my friend Roger Schiller, who did not die in a hail of bullets buy is dead
just the same, I heard Rich Strong,
who came from Colorado to play mandolin with
his father Chris, say that he lived
minutes away from the theater and that one his students was among the dead and
another gravely injured. So,
unexpectedly, I was once again in the broad loop of that tragedy.

One
eruption of mayhem I feel a particular kinship to occurred four years ago this
last week on July 27, 2008. As these
things go, it was not a major event.
They body count was low—only two dead and a handful injured. If it were not for the somewhat unusual
location of the shooting, it would have received no notice at all outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.

It
was a Sunday morning—and it is always a Sunday morning in my mind when I
remember it, regardless of the exact anniversary date. A sad, disgruntled man whose life was unraveling,
walked into the Tennessee Valley
Unitarian Universalist Church that bright morning as children from two
local congregations were getting ready to present their summer program, an adaptation
of the sunny, iconic musical Annie.
He removed a shotgun, primitive
weapon compared to the high powered ordinance used in other killings, from a
guitar case and began blasting away in the crowed sanctuary. He kept firing until he was tackled and
disarmed by congregants as others fled in terror leaving mangled bodies behind.

The
killing spree turned out to be somewhat unusual in that it seemed to be motivated
by something more than just a twisted desire for infamy base on a total body
count of anonymous strangers. The killer
picked this church and the people in it.
He had a motive of sorts. He
wrote it down in a rambling manifesto that the police later found. He believed that liberals had ruined his life.
And because he could not get to the politicians he especially despised,
he sought to kill those who he thought
had elected them, the liberal members of the local Unitarian
Universalist Church. Of course it also
turned out that his ex-wife had been a member and that he had once been a
welcome guest. So perhaps his political
motivations were mixed in with other harbored resentments.

My
connection to this little horror comes not because I knew the victims, although
I knew people very like them. It came
because I was accustomed to spending my Sunday mornings in another UU
congregation in Woodstock, Il. And I had been at summer services where liturgy
was jettisoned in favor of some interesting or compelling program put on by the
lay members. And what could be more
interesting, compelling and just plain delightful than beloved children you
know by their first names singing familiar songs. I felt it could have been me collecting the
fatal buckshot, that it could have been my church.

The
children never got to sing their songs that morning. They were shepherded out of the church and
away from danger. But the next night
when the whole of Knoxville seemed to gather at the near-by Presbyterian Church for a memorial
service, they asked—no demanded—to sing their song.

Video
of them singing that optimistic tune and of the whole assembly joining in moved
me deeply.

Naturally,
I wrote a poem, which I read the next week in church and again on the first
anniversary.

1 comment:

This means that four Years ago I returned to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Charleston WV. I had attend one in Charlotte NC and moved to WV several years before. I still thought of myself as a UU, but it was easier to listen to NPR in the morning than get up and go to "Church".

The week before the shooting I attended the funeral of a young friend who died from complications from giving birth. The "Preacher" spoke of Hell, Damnation, Repenting, and sin. He barely mentioned Kara. This left what I can only describe as an ugly psychic slime in my mind. Then I heard about the shooting and I decided to make a commitment to start going again.

I am now on three committees, am leading a Covenant Group, am a Worship Associate and one of three Trustees.